Oracle Blog

Tor Norbye's Weblog

Thursday Mar 13, 2008

One thing that spoiled things a bit for me is theFeature Comparison matrix they posted on their website. Along with the predictable green column for RadRails, they have red X's next to a lot of features in the NetBeans column. Features that definitely are there in NetBeans (and in some cases I would argue more so than in Aptana).

If you're going to post a feature comparison I think it's a bit irresponsible to do so without actually checking what the competition offers. NetBeans is free (and no registration is even required), so it's easy to download to check, and if you don't even want to do that, just google "NetBeans Ruby" which will point right to our Wiki which has extensive feature lists listed right on the front page.

(Update: Their feature matrix has been updated, and now recognizes that NetBeans does in fact offer RHTML editing, YAML editing, and XML editing.) There are however a number of errors remaining. Here are some of them.

(This isn't really for the feature comparison since we don't ship it by default, but a regular expression tester is available for NetBeans as well - see this video for a tour.)

A green checkmark versus a red x seems a bit simplistic; not all feature implementations are equal. For code completion for example, there are factors such as how complete it is, how good the documentation markup is, parameter tooltips, whether completion helps you with hash keys, whether you get active record database field completion, and so on.

I'll forward this to their feedback alias so hopefully the page can be corrected. I'm trying to make the point to anyone else out there who is planning to make a competitive matrix: If you haven't actually checked, use a question mark rather than a red x for features from the competition.

Well, with that out of the way I don't want to rain on their parade; it's great that we have competition in the Ruby and Rails toolspace, and a 1.0 is a big accomplishment. Congratulations!